Resilience and values

Instrumentalist and critical narratives of resilience have seldom engaged discussing the ‘values’ underpinning it. We propose that mapping resilience values against worldviews can help translate the articulation of theoretical narratives as public policy. This can help establish an evidence-base to assess if resilience thinking is - in practice - the inclusive and participatory agenda that policy claims it to be; or – on the other hand – to understand the ways in which resilience is a new market for exploitation, as its critics have claimed. The inclusion of a worldviews perspective in conjunction with the contextual aspect of place approach associated with geographers will help actors design better resilience-led interventions, by targeting such interventions more appropriately to the values of the target audience. The paper summarizes two dominant narratives and suggests pathways for the inclusion of a third pathway that derives empirical approaches from values-oriented research at multiple scales.